miniblog.

You can now buy lamps with speakers you can control remotely: https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/symfonisk-table-lamp-with-wifi-speaker-black-50357592/ I imagine we'll see home devices integrating smart speakers rather than separate devices eventually.

Perhaps all links should have a tooltip with a preview of the content. I'm struggling to see a downside. We moved from double- to single-clicking links, why not make the site/browser do more work before clicking?

I'll be at @poplconf 2020! Do say hello.

Cute elisp trick I haven't seen before: point works as a place with setf! ;; Move point to the beginning of the buffer (setf (point) (point-min)) ;; Equivalent: (goto-char (point-min))

I still find it amazing that Google provides _free_, _unlimited_ image storage at a reasonable resolution. It's a really nice service, but I don't understand the economic rationale.

GitHub now provides a feature to discover when you've accidentally leaked company private keys: https://developer.github.com/partnerships/token-scanning/ Makes sense, but it's a shame it's needed. It's easy to screw up.

I don't think we're held back by hardware: it's usually insufficient imagination. Devices like smart lights (Hue) or smart speakers (Alexa) didn't use new hardware, and could have been invented a little earlier.

I have a theory that developers are more willing to sit and stare at a progress bar than an average person. It's probably conditioning.

On treating email as an infinite scroll rather than a buffer to be emptied: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/01/case-inbox-infinity/579673/ I've found Inbox Zero to be a really effective approach, but it comes at a cost. The article seems to mix 'must respond' with 'must read' in email tasks.

"Most iPhone users could not tell you where the most-used apps on their phone live." Changing culture of device usage:

It's weird how email addresses have become a useful way of uniquely identifying people in usernames. This isn't something email was originally intended for. It makes sense: I imagine postal addresses and even names change more often than email.

AI predictions are difficult, especially about the future: https://rodneybrooks.com/the-seven-deadly-sins-of-predicting-the-future-of-ai/

Automation does not seem to have much of an impact: people are rarely forced to change industry, companies are not investing heavily in AI, and productivity growth is slow: https://www.wired.com/2017/08/robots-will-not-take-your-job/

Waymo has been testing fully driverless cars (i.e. without a human ready to intervene) since 2017! https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/12/driverless-cars-became-a-reality-in-2017-and-hardly-anyone-noticed/

Switching from xz to zstd package compression in Arch Linux gives a ~13x improvement in decompression time with only a ~1% increase in file size!